Game (Jasper Dent #2)(105)

“I’d like you to be there, too,” Jazz said savagely.

“Ha! Good one! Nice! But if I could be a blowfly and buzz around, I would get a hell of a chuckle, Jasper. You’ve been there. Tell me—what evidence are those good ol’ boys gonna find in his place?”

Nothing, Jazz knew, and didn’t say.

“And girls,” Billy amended. “Good ol’ boys and girls. They got lady cops and they got that cutie FBI agent, Morales, don’t they? It’s a hell of a diverse task force, ain’t it? Got Morales and they got that big ol’ Negro Hughes, don’t they? Is it okay to say ‘Negro,’ Jasper? I’m wonderin’, ’cause it sounds a lot like that other word that people get so het up about. I gotta ask you, you bein’ my expert on such things on account of sticking it to that pretty little kinky-haired girl.”

“You bastard,” Jazz seethed. “You just keep talking and talking and talking, don’t you? Talking in circles and spirals and trying to keep everyone on their toes, babbling nonsense to cover up the fact that you’ve killed and tortured so many. People died when you escaped. You made me complicit in that. People died.”

“Were they important?” Billy asked blandly. The voice of a man asking for vanilla ice cream.

“They mattered!”

“Why? Because they were alive? Because they were people? Is that all it takes? If everyone’s special, ain’t no one special, Jasper.”

Jazz realized he’d dropped to his knees at some point during the call, the weight of Billy’s voice, the sheer mass of his psychic venom dragging Jazz down, down, down. He had trouble breathing. Billy’s voice was relentless, eternal, and it brought back every half memory and barely recalled figment from his childhood. Jazz was a boy again, not a man. He was a toddler, waddling around the house, following a mother who would soon be gone, reaching chubby arms out to a father glowing with the satisfaction of having slaughtered—at that point—dozens.

“You still with me, Jasper?” Billy said, not pausing, not giving him a chance to recover. “Hate to think I could be talkin’ to a dead line, you know? Hate to think of this fatherly advice bein’ wasted.”

“We’re tracking this call,” Jazz said, hoarse. A pathetic lie, obviously told. Jazz didn’t expect his father to buy it, and sure enough, Billy didn’t even acknowledge it, just kept on talking:

“I still have so much to teach you. There are days when I sit here, when I sit here and I think, There’s so much I still haven’t taught him. So much I need to give him. We lost time, Jasper. Lost four good years, four important years. And that’s on me. That’s my fault, y’hear me? I take that blame and I carry it on my shoulders every day and it makes me stooped and weak, to think that I let my needs and my urges come between us. I’d’a been able to control myself better, those two sunny, silly bitches’d still be alive and I’d be home and we’d be doing just fine, learning together.”

Jazz fumbled with his cell, flicking to where the pictures were stored, tapping and swiping until he found the one he was looking for: a scan of the picture of his mother. The only thing left of her.

And what about Mom? Jazz wanted to ask. Would we be one big happy family? But there was no point. Billy had killed Mom—had erased her—years before he killed in Lobo’s Nod, years before he’d been captured by G. William.

“You don’t have anything to teach me,” Jazz managed. “You taught me enough.”

“It’s never enough. When you have your own kids, you’ll understand. You’ll be fifty, and you’ll still be my boy, Jasper, and I’ll still wish I could take you and put my arm around you and teach you what you need to know in this ugly, evil world.”

Jazz swiped his mother’s picture aside. A new photo: him with Connie and Howie, all grinning for the camera. The shot was bittersweet—he enjoyed seeing the honest smile on his own face, the camaraderie with his closest friends, but the picture had been snapped by Ginny Davis one day after school. Poor, dead Ginny, her death caused by the Impressionist—and, therefore, by Billy—and not prevented by Jazz himself.

“You think you can come after me, don’t you?” Billy asked. “That’s why no one’s tracing this call. That’s why you’re not screaming your head off for help. Because you want me all to yourself. Just like a crow.”

A crow… Jazz slid his phone away and used his free hand to steady himself on the floor. The fog in his brain began to clear, just a little, and through the parting clouds he saw a black bird, its wings wide and all-encompassing. “A crow,” he said. “Crows. Belsamo—Dog—had a crow on his laptop. He made noises like a crow. And the Impressionist said something about—”

“You been thinkin’ about that story, Jasper?”

“The one you told me. About the Crow King. I looked it up once. Tried to find it in a book or on the Web. But it doesn’t exist. No one knows it.”

“Yeah. That’s the one. That was your favorite when you were a kid.”

“No.”

“Well, seemed to me like you liked it! Always got a chuckle out of it. Anyway, like I said before—it’s not just a story. It ain’t just somethin’ made up. It’s got some real in it, you see?”